Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: The Freedom Not to Think

by Gillian Smith-Clark, ​for The 44 North, Editor-in-Chief

"Spring Greening Along The River" by Pat Katz

As I ran alongside the riverbank on a clear, crisp fall afternoon in my new city, following a dirt path through a canopy of trees just beginning to turn colour, I should have felt relaxed. Instead, the moment when I normally let go, letting the music from my headphones seep into my consciousness and my mind drift and clear, didn’t come.

My thoughts were jumbled and scattered—moving between the beauty of my surroundings, whether I was alone on the trail, the warmth of the sun, and: How safe is it to run alone here?

That particular section of the trail was a paradox. Covered in foliage and sheltered from view of the nearby road, what made it so lovely was also what made it potentially dangerous. An acquaintance had recently reminded me of a murder that occurred decades ago, somewhere along this riverbank. How safe is it now? Should I have an alarm or pepper spray? Should I not be wearing a ponytail, because someone could jump out of the bushes and grab it? How long would it take for someone to get to me if I were attacked and screamed?

Am I overreacting, overthinking? Maybe.

Images of the men in my life, past and present, filled my head. Some were rolling their eyes. I wanted to let my mind drift. I wanted to turn up the volume on my music and daydream, but I couldn’t.

The memory of Alyssa Lokits surfaces—a horrific story that happened on a trail not unlike this one. With a shiver, I wonder how far I am from the paved trail and more people.

What lingered after that run was not whether I was overthinking the situation, but the fact that the calculations had to happen at all. Alongside that was another uncomfortable realization: How many years of my life have contained a similar mental calculus—the times when I got it right, and the moments when I realized I’d made a costly error.

Some of us move through the world carrying questions daily that others rarely have to ask; still others inherit forms of watchfulness so embedded in our psyches that we barely notice the effort they require.

That idea—of attention, and of who is required to pay it—runs quietly through many of the pieces in this issue. What do we learn to notice? What are we afforded the freedom not to think about? And once something enters our awareness, what responsibility follows?

"The Meewasin Trail" by Pat Katz

“Braiding a Ladder” is a pivotal piece, bringing together three different but equally powerful perspectives on modern-day misogyny. At its heart is a question about what happens when the burden of noticing misogyny is disproportionately carried by the people most likely to experience its consequences. Women are often asked to remain alert to risk, to recognize warning signs, to modify our behaviour, to protect ourselves, to explain what happened afterward. But what changes when the work of paying attention is more widely shared? When men look more closely at the language, assumptions, jokes, behaviours and systems around them, and begin to ask what responsibility follows from what they see?

The same movement from attention to awareness to responsibility appears elsewhere in this issue, although in very different forms.

Our Artist Spotlight takes an unexpected turn this issue, placing Earth itself at the centre. In “Earth is the Artist,” memory, land, family history, displacement, grief and environmental harm become tangled together. The piece asks us to look differently at something we so often relegate to the background: The ground beneath us. What changes when the Earth is not scenery, property, or resource, but witness and maker; something that carries memory, bears wounds, and responds to what we ask it to absorb?

Wardah Malik’s essay on tradwife and girlboss culture turns that same act of attention inward. Her question—are our desires truly our own?—is deceptively simple. The lifestyles we imagine we’ve freely chosen do not emerge in a vacuum; they’re shaped by economics, gender expectations, cultural narratives, algorithms, and the particular forms of security or escape available to us at a given moment. What feels entirely personal may also carry the fingerprints of forces we have stopped noticing.

Elsewhere in the issue, attention becomes an act of care. “The Wake of the Nepal Flash Floods: Keeping Each Other Alive” looks at what remains when catastrophe strips away the illusion of self-sufficiency. Our conversation with Rohit Doel asks us to distinguish between grief, loneliness, and isolation within disabled friendships rather than flattening different experiences into one. And Fernn Eastman’s “From Feeding Tube to Paramedic: Your Body Is Not Your Enemy” turns toward the intimate work of learning to inhabit the body differently.

These pieces are not making the same argument, nor are the experiences they explore equivalent. But together, they ask us to look beneath the surface of what’s immediately visible—at the assumptions, histories, systems, desires, memories, and burdens that sit just underneath ordinary life. 

At its core, this is an issue about freedom and what that means: The freedom not to think, the cost of constant attention, and the responsibility that begins when we finally notice.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Warmly,

Gillian Smith-Clark

Editor-in-Chief, The 44 North Media

Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: What We Carry Forward

by Gillian Smith-Clark, ​for The 44 North, Editor-in-Chief

Les Misérables at the West End, featuring the 40th Anniversary London cast. Photo courtesy of the production.

A few weeks ago, I found myself sitting in a London theatre watching Les Misérables, a musical I had not seen for many years, based on a book I loved as a teenager.

I had mixed feelings about going. I knew it would be a good performance, but I had already seen the musical twice and wondered whether the experience would offer me anything new. Instead, the soaring, grief-filled music took me by surprise. Perhaps it was the perspective brought by time and distance, or simply the experience of encountering a familiar story at a different stage of life, but I found myself unexpectedly moved by both its force and its continuing relevance.

Les Mis left me thinking about memory, grief, repair and redemption: Themes echoed throughout this issue, beginning with Alaina Zhang’s thoughtful review and analysis of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

We often speak of "moving on" or "moving forward" as though healing requires us to leave the past behind. But perhaps the more difficult—and more honest—task is learning what to carry forward.

The pieces in this issue approach that question from many directions. In the Writers’ Room, Mikaela Brewer’s short story, "On the Wildfires: Of Course She Ran Back," follows a young girl walking home through wildfire smoke, confronting an environmental crisis her generation did not create but will nevertheless inherit. In Poet’s Corner, a discussion of Amanda Gunn’s "Ordinary Sugar" considers memory, ancestry and the ordinary acts through which people remain present in our lives.

Two feature essays examine darker forms of inheritance. In the first instalment of a three-part series, Randa Ali explores the environmental costs of war and the damage that continues long after the immediate fighting has ended. Temi Jolaawo’s "It’s in Our DNA: The Resurgence of Eugenics and Health Propaganda" examines how discredited ideas can return in new forms when the histories behind them are forgotten or deliberately distorted.

Elsewhere, "Dinner Isn’t Debt: What Paying the Bill Reveals About Romance, Power, and Control" considers the expectations we bring into intimate relationships, while "Searching for a Voice in Politics: Youth Are Citizens Now, Not in the Future" challenges us to recognize youth as full participants in civic life now, rather than treating their voices as preparation for some later point when their citizenship will finally count.

We also share key insights, notes and quotations from our recent live podcast event, Beyond Words: Addressing Anti-Black Racism and Discriminatory Language in Schools, along with Farhaan Batchkhan’s essay, "Racist Language Is Never Just a Joke: On Building a World Worth Belonging To."

And last but certainly not least, our spotlighted artist, Patrick de Belen, invites us into grief, memory, responsibility, silence, scars, wounds, and how they coexist across creative work and relationships alike.

Together, these pieces ask us to consider not only what we remember, but what our remembering requires of us.

We are all shaped by what came before: The stories our families tell, the histories our countries choose to remember or forget, the landscapes altered by decisions made long before we arrived, and the private joys and griefs that change how we move through the world. But inheritance is not the same as destiny. Part of becoming fully ourselves, individually and collectively, is deciding what we will carry forward, what we will repair and what we must finally learn to put down.

I will end with a recommendation to see Christopher Nolan’s recent adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek epic, The Odyssey—or better yet, to read the original. I particularly recommend Emily Wilson’s translation, although Wilson herself has offered a decidedly critical assessment of the film.

Regardless of how faithfully the adaptation captures Homer’s work, the story’s enduring themes reinforce an idea that runs throughout this issue: Every generation inherits a world shaped by memories it did not personally create. We inherit stories, wounds, traditions, warnings and unfinished work.

Our responsibility is not to hand the next generation a version of the past stripped of discomfort. It is to help them carry its hard truths without being crushed by them—and to trust them to create something wiser and more compassionate from what remains.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Warmly,

Gillian Smith-Clark

Editor-in-Chief, The 44 North Media

Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: Words, Silence, and the Space Between

by Gillian Smith-Clark, ​for The 44 North, Editor in Chief

In partnership with Harmony Movement, University of Toronto Schools, and Unsinkable, our event will feature 4 panellists who will explore the role of language in both reinforcing harm & creating the conditions for more respectful, inclusive, and courageous school communities. Gillian’s Letter from the Editor-in-Chief prefaces both our June/July 2026 issue & our Words Matter event.

On a hot April day more than two decades ago, in a parking lot in Chestertown, Maryland, an elderly Black woman shared a story with me.

I was a young mother then, carrying my eight-month-old daughter, and our conversation had naturally turned to children. The woman told me she had spent much of her life caring for children in white families’ homes. Once, she said, while bathing a little girl, the child looked at her and asked her mother why the woman’s skin was so black.

Her mother answered, “Because she’s dirty. She doesn’t clean herself properly.”

I have thought about that woman, and that story, many times over the past twenty-two years. I do not know her name. I do not know whether she is still living. But I know this: she understood something about words that we are still trying to teach. They can wound deeply. They can endure for a lifetime. They can shape a child’s understanding of the world before that child has language of their own.

That memory has returned to me often in the lead-up to our live podcast event, Beyond Words: Addressing Anti-Black Racism and Discriminatory Language in Schools. It has also shaped the way I have been thinking about this issue of The 44 North—about language, silence, memory, belonging, and the responsibility we all carry in the words we choose, repeat, challenge, or leave unspoken.

There are few things as ordinary, and simultaneously as powerful, as words.

A single word, an ordinary phrase, can carry enormous energy—not unlike a uranium fuel pellet, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, yet dense with potential. That energy can be harnessed to power something lasting or mishandled in ways that cause profound harm. Words, too, carry that kind of force. A few words can comfort, persuade, invite, wound, exclude, repair, or remain with someone for years.

We use words to explain, to question, to remember, to apologize, to protest, to belong. We use them to tell people who we are, and to try to understand who they are. We use them to build relationships, communities, movements, families, and futures.

And sometimes, just as powerfully, we withhold them.

Silence can be peaceful, protective, or wise. It can give people space to breathe. But silence can also reject, alienate, erase, or abandon. It can make harm feel invisible. It can leave people wondering whether anyone noticed, whether anyone cared, whether what happened mattered at all.

This issue arrives at a time when language is doing a great deal of work in the world around us: June marks Indigenous History Month, PRIDE, and Juneteenth. It is also a time when we are reflecting on seniors and elders, on the environment, on public spaces, and on the communities we are trying to build and protect.

Each of these themes asks something of us: to remember, listen and to name histories honestly. To honour joy without ignoring struggle, and to recognize dignity across generations. We must understand that stewardship is not only environmental but relational. How we speak about land, identity, belonging, history, age, justice, and care shapes how we act—and who we include when we envision the future.

In this issue, those questions surface in many different ways: In a documentary review of International Students – First 48 Hours & Life After Graduation; in a discussion of Natalie Diaz’s haunting poem, “The First Water Is the Body”; and in reflections on Indigenous history, PRIDE, seniors, elders, and belonging, including this month’s Writer’s Room piece, “Pride Month for Seniors & Elders: Weeping Willow.” Taken together, these pieces, along with others, remind us that words are never only words. They shape what we remember, what we protect, who we honour, and how we imagine our responsibilities to one another.

Words can open doors. They can also slam them shut.

Language can invite someone into a conversation, or quietly let them know, “There is no place for you here.” They can help people feel seen or teach them to make themselves smaller. They can challenge cruelty or normalize it. They can make repair possible, or deepen the harm.

This is at the heart of our upcoming live podcast event, as well as in Lillian Currie’s powerful special-edition essay for The 44 North, “Words Matter: Harm builds over time. So does healing,” where she writes about the way language shapes school culture – not only through what is said, but through what is ignored, excused, laughed off, or left unchallenged.

One of the questions to which I keep returning is this: How do we find empathy and compassion in the midst of difficult conversations, especially when harmful or discriminatory language has been used? How do we express ourselves honestly, and sometimes forcefully, without sliding into disrespect, contempt, or silence ourselves? How do we advocate for change while still leaving room for growth, complexity, and repair?

These are not easy questions, but they are necessary ones.

This does not mean avoiding hard truths or softening injustice into something more comfortable. It does not mean asking those who have been harmed to make their pain more palatable for others. But it does mean understanding that the way we speak can either widen the circle of responsibility or harden people into defensiveness to the point where they become unreachable. It means knowing the difference between accountability and humiliation, between conviction and cruelty.

If I could speak to my younger self, I would tell her that one of the most valuable—and most painful—lessons I have learned is how to recognize contempt and disdain when they enter the room, and how to move through conversation without absorbing them as truth. 

That matters in classrooms, and it matters online. It matters in families, friendships, workplaces, public debate, and politics. Young people are growing up in a world where language moves quickly, harshly, and frequently with an anonymity that shields the source. They are asked to navigate comment sections, group chats, classrooms, social media, identity, crises, humour, and conflict daily.

We need more spaces now where both safety and honesty are possible. Where vulnerability is not punished. Where mistakes can be addressed without being ignored, and harm can be named without requiring those harmed to carry the entire burden of explanation.

Emotional safety does not mean the absence of discomfort. In fact, some of the most important conversations require discomfort. But it does mean creating conditions where people are not mocked, dismissed, dehumanized, or left alone with their unease. It means building spaces—online and in person—where people can speak, listen, repair, and change.

In many ways, this issue is about those spaces.

As you read it, I hope you find pieces that make you think, pause, question, self-examine, and care. I hope you find words that challenge you, comfort you, and perhaps invite you into a conversation you have been avoiding.

I often think of the woman in that small-town parking lot in Maryland; her story has stayed with me for more than twenty years.

She could not undo the harm of the words spoken in that bathroom so long ago. But by telling the story, she did something powerful: she refused to let those words remain hidden. She carried them into the light, where they could be seen, understood, and perhaps transformed into something else.

A single story, shared in an ordinary place, can ripple outward across years. It can shape how a young mother thinks about systems, language, parenting—morality. It has an echo. And in part, this echo is of faith and belief: In addressing racism, white people carry immense responsibility. But they must also believe that there is hope, among the racialized members of our communities, that we will bear it. This relationship—rooted in care and repair as actions that earn trust—is vital, whether between strangers in a parking lot, friends, family, or colleagues we craft meaningful events with.

Because harm builds over time, but so does healing.

And sometimes, healing begins with the courage to speak and the humility to truly listen.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Warmly,

Gillian Smith-Clark

Editor-in-Chief, The 44 North Media